


Nobody shoots my partner, unless he is really asking for it.

by rjn



Category: Numb3rs (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 07:17:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17075828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjn/pseuds/rjn
Summary: Colby doesn't respect David's authority when it comes to sticking to approved Bureau tactical planning. It is a bit of an issue.





	Nobody shoots my partner, unless he is really asking for it.

Colby and David had split up to cover more ground. It wasn’t an unusual situation, each clearing a row of shipping containers, and they’d had their vests on. They were pretty sure it was an unmanned sort of place, where legitimate shipping concerns did business in close proximity to the evil doers and the only thing that would look out of place in the comings and goings at port was too much extra security. They were taking it seriously, even though they saw the last of the suspected arms dealers drive out hours ago, and they weren’t expecting to find much. The deal was in the early preparation stages, and this exercise was just a way to scope the site layout for an upcoming raid. Or possibly, Colby had joked, there would already be dozens of open crates full of incriminating guns and cash and they could wrap everything up before the weekend.

Maybe the first sign of impending doom was that Colby’s radio hadn’t been keeping its charge lately. They never had any problem understanding one another anyways, hand signals and subtle body language, and even when it’s the exact opposite of what David would like him to do, Colby has a way of telegraphing his tactical maneuvers in advance. So radio silence was okay for the seventy feet or so of distance between them, although a fog was already coming in off the bay and making it difficult to see much further than that. They could see each other whenever they covered the space between each container.

The wail of feedback that assaulted David’s earpiece must have come from Colby’s malfunctioning radio, and he’d almost laughed, after the initial shock of it. He knew Colby had his earpiece in, despite his radio issues, and it would have squealed twice as loud on his own set. Consider it payback for Granger’s clandestine decaf experiment last week and the subsequent headaches David had endured.

In the end, David figures that’s the only way anyone had managed to get the drop on them; Colby distracted, digging a hand over his shoulder trying to flick out his earpiece or maybe he’d squeezed his eyes shut for just a second too long.

They’d made Colby scream, just to bring David running. And maybe the sight of everyone’s favorite Idahoan G-man slumped and bleeding out of nowhere, a gun at his temple, was upsetting enough that David didn’t size things up properly. They could have easily killed both David and Colby the moment David surrendered and put his gun on the ground. The radio noises had saved them. The low-level night watch had been deciding their next course of action when a sudden squelching and run of feedback burst out of Colby’s broken radio. Spooked and panicking that an FBI raid of monumental proportions was closing in on them, they had escaped by boat, buying time by threatening to further perforate Colby so that David was forced to lock himself up.

~*~

They’d left Colby on his side, turned facing the wall, but David can tell he’s starting to come around by the way his breathing hitches and the muscles in his neck flex, shoulders hunching minutely, a flinch, but slower. It’s not something obvious in the dim light, but Colby’s back is most of what he’s been staring at for the last five minutes, having exhausted all other views on a careful scan of every part of the warehouse visible from his vantage point.

David’s wrists are in his own cuffs locked together around a steel support beam that is just narrow enough that he was able to slide down and sit, his legs kicked out in front of him. The fact that Colby’s handcuffs are employed securing David’s ankles together is… not great.  It means they wanted David locked up soundly, but weren’t worried about Colby, assumed he didn’t have the strength left to go anywhere, even with nothing but an extension cord haphazardly knotted around his wrists and fed through a grate in the floor.

That’s why the concentration on the slow rise and fall of Colby’s back. Because for a few minutes there, David was pretty sure he was going to witness, helplessly, from a distance of three or so feet away on dusty concrete, the slow ebb of Colby’s last breath.

He had almost screamed at the frustrating horror of it, imaging Don’s arrival, too late for the rescue, his boss crumbling in devastation and David sitting there uselessly. But Colby’s been breathing strong and easily. The blood on the bit of his shirt David can see has already dried into a duller shade and not been replaced with any kind of dangerously continual seeping.  Children, drunks, fools, and Colby. God looks out for his special pets. Although Colby is a bit of a full-time project, so God also enlisted David and Don as back-up.

And yeah, he knows all about Don and Colby, knew before Colby took him aside before work one day a few months ago to tell him. David ended up having to reassure his friend that it wasn’t likely anybody else noticed, not from looking at Colby, anyways. Colby is the same kind of earnest square jaw enthusiasm about everything, so he can just about get away with a certain kind of secrecy. He believes in himself holding a pair of twos as much as he believes in himself dealt a straight flush. Colby’s poker face is having no poker face at all, for anything, ever. Don is a different story. Don spends so much time wearing his patently focused work face that when he smiles genuinely it’s the like world shifts on its axis.

When a bunch of them went to get their diving certifications together last summer there was a bit of time at the end for practicing, just playing around in the pool, but Don had finished the required steps and was going to hit the showers, work face firmly plastered over his features. Then Colby dunked him. Manhandled him in a way that David figured would have got a guy shot if Don was on dry ground and packing. And even though he was sputtering and drenched at the end of the protracted water wrestling match, Don was grinning like an idiot when he finally left. So, yeah, David knew about them.

Colby groans from the concrete floor. If they get out of this okay, Don is probably going to make Colby wear a riot helmet every time he leaves the office going forward. It was a knife wound that had him screaming before, but if he’s survived that injury for this long, it’s the kick in the head that they need to worry about now. Colby’s just about reached his career limit on concussions.

His whole body tenses suddenly in front of David, who can only watch as Colby tries to move his hands, panics, and yanks on the cords, torqueing his whole body roughly. So much for keeping the bleeding at bay, David thinks, as Colby curls in on himself like the wound on his side just above his hip is fresh hell all over again, then starts pulling, slightly more gently than before, against the restraints.

“Colby, hey. Hey, don’t.”

David rolls as far as he can move onto his side so he can just touch Colby’s back with his feet, a nudge to get his attention and let him know he’s not alone. Colby is obviously confused, because the thrashing gets more desperate. David shouts his name, once, and he finally goes still.

“David?”

“Yeah. Don’t hurt yourself. Take a breath.”

He does.

“Ow.”

David lets him settle for another moment, waits until he sees the first breath in and out that doesn’t jolt Colby’s body.

“Okay?”

“Uh.”

“Considering,” David adds.

“I’m okay.”

“I’m cuffed, so unless we want to wait for our patrol check-in to call Don and risk those guys realizing we were not the first of many waves of Feds and coming back to kill us, it’s up to you to get us loose.”

Colby swears, a hopeless sounding noise, but David can see him already working his hands in front of his face, trying to get a look at how they’re tied. It’s generally difficult to tie people up well with electrical cords, so there’s a chance if Colby can gather himself together…

“I got this,” he says eventually, and cranes his neck to get at the cords with his teeth.

David almost laughs at his casual self-assuredness. He should probably hate Colby, he sometimes thinks, based on their personalities. But Colby’s brand of overzealousness is not too far off from the doggedness of Don Eppes, and most of the time David knows how to work with that. There’s an unsettling level of determination behind the headlong leaps with those two, and Christ, what must _that_ look like in the bedroom.

A pained noise comes from over Colby’s hunched back and his breathing is noticeably harsher.

“Doing okay?”

Colby starts muttering, and David recognizes Don’s influence again, keeping his mind off the pain by complaining under his breath about the task at hand. David remembers early on working with Don, a bad break up and Don muttering through an entire stakeout about how uncomfortable their car was.

Colby, mouth full of cable, with breaks to catch his breath and occasional grunts of discomfort, is not just muttering, though. He’s expecting David to listen.

“You remember last week… the guy in the corner store and the… goddamn _shotgun_ in my face and you were all swooping in cool and… _‘nobody shoots my partner’_?”

David ignores the bad baritone impression of his own voice and uh-huhs some sort of acknowledgement, not wanting to let Colby go too far off track.

Colby makes a frustrated noise before he responds, his husky voice going up in register with annoyance.

“Then what the fuck was this, man?”

David laughs mirthlessly.

“I never said anything about stabbing you.”

Colby is making enough headway that he stays quiet for a few beats, working. Then.

“Stabbed? Huh.”

And suddenly David is on a whole extra level of concerned about Colby’s head, because there’s no way _he’ll_ ever forget the surprised wet-sounding yelp and the scream that made him surrender his gun so easily. And what a track record Colby has lately if he takes a supposed gunshot wound in stride, but a broken promise David made to a junkie convenience store robber, that’s the part where he feels let down. David is about to suggest that Colby should probably know the difference between a GSW and a stab wound by feel at this point, but there’s another curse from the other man followed by a “Ta-da!” and a flourish of the hands that would have been a whole lot cooler if Colby hadn’t gasped in pain immediately after.

He gets to his knees, manages a three point stance after a moment and finally walks, hunched over, his left arm wrapped tight around his midsection, to get a look at David’s situation. David lets him linger for a while, catching his breath under the guise of inspecting the handcuffs. It gives David a chance to take a better look at Colby’s injuries, before he points him towards a tool bench. Colby stumbles over to it, falls into it a bit and sends small tools clattering to the ground. He holds up the dumbest thing he finds, an honest-to-Christ wood splitting maul. David is not in the mood for jokes, and he lets loose a profane reply.

 “Not even if you hold real still?” offers Colby. He’s already on his way over with a hammer and chisel-looking thing by the time David can let loose another insult.

David has seen this method of handcuff removal before, some internet trick video about twisting your wrist one way and hammering a heavy gauge nail or awl through the keyhole. And it only works about 20% of the time, so naturally Colby sees it as a sure thing. David is almost annoyed that it works on both sets, except that he’s overwhelmed by relief that his concussed friend managed not to hammer a rusty awl through his wrists.

It’s a little disorienting for a moment, rushing out of the warehouse through the nearest door, because on entering the space David had been preoccupied trying to determine if Colby, who was being dragged along by his vest, was still alive. Thankfully he’s working with a guy who could emerge from a coma in an underground bunker after a year and still know where to find the closest waves, so he watches Colby tip his face up for a clue, and then even David catches enough of a sea breeze to know which way to the LAPD patrol. He helps Colby along, staying in the shadow of the shipping containers all the way until the perimeter fence. Colby throws up twice, just pushes David away and heaves over to one side, trying to avoid his own shoes. When he can’t go any further, David props him up in the best place possible for cover, throws his vest and jacket over Colby and runs the last three hundred yards to the vehicle. Don has already been contacted ahead of the missed check-in, because of “radio irregularities”, so it’s only a few minutes before enough back-up arrives for them to get medics to Colby.

~*~

“… _Bush league._ And if the dealers hadn’t been bush league too, I’d be writing your fucking eulogy right now.”

Don is giving a unique delivery of David’s early morning dressing down, standing outside his own office doorway and yelling in, because David got the message to sit down and wait for him before Don got back from the hospital. He only pauses long enough to step in and close the door behind him near the end, when he gets to the part about Colby.

“What happened to the six-man team I signed off on? Colby tried to say _he_ made that call?”

“He said you were okay with it as long as the surveillance beforehand…”

“I’ll deal with him later. But that’s bullshit, David. Colby doesn’t call your shots.”

“I know. But I thought you and he had…”

Don is standing behind his desk now, like he’s about to sit, but instead he kicks his chair across the floor so that it crashes into a file cabinet.

“I don’t want to hear excuses.”

Don sits down heavily in his chair where it’s resting now, away from his desk. He looks drained. One of his hands goes to the back of his neck, rubbing, and David recognizes that gesture as one he picked up from Colby. He always wonders if they do it to show off their triceps, but then the gesture it seems to have replaced most is the nervous watch-checking, so maybe not.

“The guy has no instinct for self-preservation.”

David doesn’t say anything out loud, just sort of gestures with his hands in Don’s direction, as if to say “obviously” and it’s enough to set his boss off again.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

David takes a deep breath, considering. He’d thought about it for the last few hours, between the port and the office, whether he was going to bring it up at last, or if he would just eat shit one more time, let Don run up one side of him and down the other one more time, let Colby be bashful and sorry but ultimately get off scot-free one more time. No, it needs to be done.

“Colby comes waltzing in here after a close call every other week with a bunch of stitches and a stupid grin on his face and you two laugh about everything in the breakroom while I sit at my desk and try to figure out how to write up our reports some way so that Colby doesn’t get a reputation for being reckless that tanks his career down the line.”

“That was one…”

“That’s _every_ time, Don. You treat me like some bean counting square and him like a stuntman from some James Bond flick and expect him to respect my way of operating? I’m not the one putting him in danger.”

“You sound a little jealous there, David.”

“Fuck that. I love the guy, but if you can’t see how the way you treat him is messing stuff up around here, you’re an idiot.”

David braces himself for the onslaught, but Don actually just sits back a bit and frowns.

“You’re saying he’s getting special treatment?”

“No. I’m saying he’s doing stupid risky shit to impress you, and because he’s Colby, it’s working.”

“What do you want me to do, get you a different partner?”

“No. Fuck. I live in constant fear of the day I don’t get him back to you in one piece, but I’m not letting him take risks without me there backing him up either.”

Don looks slightly shaken.

“You know I’m going to deal with him. I’m not… when he gets hurt it’s hard to pile on a bunch of shit, but I’ll talk to him. There’s a reason you’re running lead on these operations.”

David nods. “And one day he’ll get to where you are, and all the confidence is there, but a bit less…”

“In his dreams. But yeah, no, his stuntman days are over.”

Don leans back in his chair at the same worryingly low angle as Colby does, and David remembers when he sort of wanted to sneakily loosen screws on their chairs at night just to teach them a lesson.

“Is he okay, though?” David asks.

“Yeah,” Don says. “He’ll be okay.”

“This is why you don’t sleep with people from work.”

It’s harsh, but a joke David can get away with because he knows how much Colby and Don actually mean to one another. Don squeezes his eyes shut but ultimately just sighs.

“Barn doors… after horses… or something,” he says vaguely.

“It’s so gross when you try to talk like him,” David says.

~*~

Colby turns up at the office before he’s technically cleared, looking vaguely ill, but also tanned, like he spent his medical days resting on the beach, and wearing loose fitting jeans and an FBI hoodie but somehow still looking cold and uncomfortable. He nods at a couple of people on his way through the office but doesn’t stop at his desk before he goes to talk to Don. David braces himself for a day full of people fawning over his injuries and the heroic way he got himself free and rescued hapless David from handcuffs with nothing but a discarded framing hammer.

Before it can start, Don shoves Colby into a chair in the conference room and lays into him. Then Charlie shows up and Colby gets treated to an hour-long presentation about how the math supports the FBI standard procedures surrounding field operations. There are charts and graphs about injuries and death statistics, and Colby emerges shortly after Charlie leaves, looking even worse than he usually does after having math shoved all over him. He looks pale as he makes his way, walking gingerly and slow, and sits down at his desk next to David.

“So, I guess I screwed that one up,” he says.

“We both did,” David says.

Colby lets that one go by with a shrug.

“You busy tonight? First day no pain pills. I’m having beers.”

He says beers with an appreciative undertone that borders on sexual. David turns his chair towards him.

“I figured Don would be hanging all over you for another couple days yet.”

Colby laughs, but it’s a little weak and he looks sore again.

“I think this one has him…” he mimes checking his watch rapidly three times in a row, a perfect encapsulation of Don Eppes in the throws of internal turmoil.

“I know,” David says, “Me too.”

“I know, and I’m sorry and I’m not _really_ going to make light of it,” Colby says, and David is already turning away and groaning. “But the thing with the hammer? I mean, come on…”

Don’s voice carries over, filling the entire floor of the building so that whatever comment Colby had queued up is forever lost to history.

“GRANGER. What the hell are you still doing here? GO HOME.”

David ducks his head so nobody outside of the cubical can see he is laughing.

“Yeah Colby. Go home.”

 


End file.
